


The Secret Diary of Carmilla Karnstein

by stickbook



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-12
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-19 20:41:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 42
Words: 18,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5980407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stickbook/pseuds/stickbook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just before the Fall 2014 semester, Carmilla starts keeping a diary. These are its entries.</p><p>A re-telling of the series from the broody one's point of view, canon-friendly and inclusive of transmedia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 16 August 2014

**16 AUGUST 2014**

_Scheisse._

This kind of thing gets worse with each passing decade. Embracing some ridiculous fad just to remain inconspicuous. And each time there’s a bizarre tipping point when you start to draw attention to yourself for _not_ participating in whatever passing fancy is au courant in the world of humans, and I do _not_ want such attention.

This time around Mother’s insisting that this “social media” be part of our little charade. This age has a markedly reduced ability to construct original thought — since there is no need to be alone with one’s thoughts, ever — and, case in point, Willy-boy seemed quite taken with his shiny new smartphone. _Schmeichler._ I asked Mattie if she was under compulsion to be one of these “Twitter” or “Tumblr” lemmings, and once she stopped cackling like a hyena she asked me if I was ever going to realize that blending in and being different from everyone else were mutually exclusive concepts and that trying to do both was an exercise in futility. I hung up on her.

The blood coffin may be long gone but clearly my punishment is far from over. Not only did the dean assign me to a triple room in the dorm, but I was also made to act as a Frosh Week chaperone. Forget what they say about herding cats; herding children is far less rewarding. The other chaperones are barely in their twenties and yet they keep talking about how the incoming classes “look younger every year.” Ha. That sensation never goes away. You just get used to it.

My two roommates, predictably, were horrid. They must have been on Mother’s list. She’s pragmatic enough to make the list longer than it needs to be; inevitably some of the targets fall through. This has only been the case since I reprised my role as a lure. Not sure if she’s noticed that particular coincidence. I’ll need to be more careful. At dinner the other night she chided me for not properly applying myself… though she did allow me to select the evening’s wine. That cellar of hers gets more impressive every time I see it.

Nonetheless, my “attitude problems” must have worked if the dean is already assigning me to a new room. It’s too bad, in some ways. The cupcakes of my now-former dorm room were easy on the eyes. I’ll say one thing for Silas: the comely nature of its coeds is quite a bit higher than that of the general populous. But when this place becomes a bit too absurd — and it frequently does — at least I have an excuse to spend time with normal people like Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Camus.

And in the spirit of being _someone whose mind watches itself_ I’ve decided to start keeping this diary. An actual pen and actual paper and liberation from the prison of 140 characters.

 

 


	2. 17 August 2014

**17 AUGUST 2014**  

Ever since the blood coffin I travel light. Left the mess for whichever hapless gudgeon gets my slot in the triple. The books are the only things that remotely matter (those, and the soymilk) and I’ve done this enough times to know that new clothes will come with the new room. Crowley Hall, 307. This shouldn’t take long.

 

* * *

 

I’m having difficulty selecting the word that best describes my new roommate. Shrill? Annoying? _Prinzessin?_ Strong contenders all.

On the other hand, considering how chafed she is that I’m not “Betty”, this may be easier than I thought. That is, if I can resist the urge to tell her that the reason we even met is because her former roommate met a grim fate at the hands of a vampire cabal, and that the only thing standing between her — Laura — and the very same fate is li’l ol’ me.

 

 


	3. 18 August 2014

**18 AUGUST 2014**

I’m not drunk. Three quarters into the bottle I liberated from Mother’s cellar and on my second carton of soymilk. That feeling that if you started to cry you might never stop. This always happens with the blondes.

This one was argumentative, at first. She got away from me at that asinine Under the Sea party — not that I tried particularly hard to catch her, whatever my Twitter feed might be telling Mother — and she bickered with me again at the Quad mixer. You’d think that such obstinance would make it easier to hand them over but it never does. Not sure why that is. It’s not as if I want the added inconvenience.

I’d always figured that letting Mother have one every so often means there are many other girls she won’t get, so the occasional sacrifice is worth it. But Mother always gets the number she needs, so I am doing any good at all? What’s the point of even trying? The universe is unfeeling. Arbitrary. How could I be so vain as to think I can alter its course in any way?

I don’t even remember the blonde’s name. Likely I never bothered to learn. _Es ist besser so_ _._ And now I’m sitting alone in the dark, writing this, in the graveyard of what used to be the old chapel.

Perhaps another bottle.

 

 


	4. 19 August 2014

**19 AUGUST 2014**

Is this a joke? Am I on camera? Oh wait, _I am._

My new roommate’s half-baked web journalism crusade is showing no signs of slowing down, and not just because she’s far too contumacious to stop. I came back from my Philosophy of Tyranny lecture to the same bunched-up little face I’ve seen on dozens of former roommates. If I cared in the slightest, I might even find her attempts at “revenge” to be mildly entertaining.

And ugh, now she’s starting to make friends and for some reason they’re all gingers and they’re starting to invade my space. There’s something familiar about the curly-haired one. Can’t quite put my finger on it.

Then there were the other two non-ginger creampuffs, blathering on and on about their bad dreams. William must’ve been the one who got to them — who else would be skittering around “like a lizard”? The brunette thought she recognized me, but it definitely wasn’t because of those dreams. And to cap it all off, Lauronica Mars insisted on “interviewing” them as part of her project.

Then, the moment they were gone, she started laying into me. _Don’t joke about that, Carmilla! You’re such a freak, Carmilla! You’re just miserable and alone, Carmilla!_ Who does she think she is? Who does she think she’s talking to? She doesn’t know me! _Diese Gör!_

(Sidenote: Upon reflection, I’m pretty sure the only reason I lost my temper was because she took me by surprise. And not much takes me by surprise — humans are all more or less the same.)

Without even pausing for breath she started prattling on about deserving a better world; I was only half-listening. But when she said that I deserved one too, it felt for just a moment like all other sound had left the room, and nothing was left but her annoying voice. Nobody’s said anything like that to me in… well, let’s just say I was still going by the title _Gräfin._ And maybe it’s the hangover talking, but watching the little dilly work this hard to expedite her own doom is not my idea of a fun semester.

And now this prosaic child — nineteen, brunette, diminutive — is fiercely throwing rocks at the proverbial hornet’s nest. Only these hornets have a sting far worse than she could ever imagine. Thousands of girls on this campus, and I pick the one that makes saving her as hard as possible. And true to form, not a minute later she’d set off the Town Hall alarm by uploading her journalism videos.

But perhaps something good will come out of this semester after all — I very much doubt the dean was expecting anyone, let alone a basic girl, to throw a monkeywrench into her big plan! As Mattie says, the look on Mother’s face when she has to get her hands dirty is priceless.

 

 


	5. 20 August 2014

**20 AUGUST 2014**

Well, that was a disaster. Last night’s Town Hall didn’t do much more than rile up a campus full of glorified kindergarteners. I positioned myself where I’d have a good view of the cub reporter getting a smack-down from the dean, and there was a point in the meeting where she sank so far down into her chair I thought she might meld with it. I nearly laughed out loud. Cupcake has ZERO poker face. If Mother really wanted to find out who uploaded the video all she’d have to do is scan the crowd for the guiltiest, most terror-stricken expression and there Laura would be.

Less pleasantly, there was this big red Xena sitting next to her that stood up and started shooting her mouth off about the missing girls. Afterwards the cupcake was looking at her like a flesh-and-blood version of that emoji with the heart eyes. (Seriously, she has no ability to play it cool.) Ugh, of course she would get all lovesick over some self-aggrandizing amazon who’s on the same moralistic warpath. The flirting was so clumsy it was painful. And what’s with all the _gingers?_

Coming back to our room to find the two of them awkwardly canoodling was not my idea of fun, so after the Town Hall devolved into a complete melee I headed to the Shunned House. Half a pint in and some Zetas showed up and started acting like they owned the place. More than usual. Something about “taking back the campus to protect the hotties”. There isn’t an eyeroll big enough. Thank god for evaporating.

What I didn’t count on was that the Zetas would be swarming _everywhere_ — including my room, where my moppet of a roommate had purblindly let two of them in. One of whom was _William_ _,_ doing his very best not to look like the smug mosquito that he is; earlier Mother had praised him for his dedication to delivering girls before again carping at me for dragging my feet.

As if that wasn’t exasperating enough, the little gumdrop of course chose that exact moment to pick another damn fight about her preposterous project! Which only ended when I bit the beefcake Zeta and he and William finally left. You’re welcome, Miss Priss.

And now — _Flammen auf der Seite meines Gesichts!_ — her videos are going viral.

She. Is. Going. To. Get. Herself. Killed.

 

 


	6. 22 August 2014

**22 AUGUST 2014**

I’ll say one thing for social media. It makes it easy to keep an eye on… people.

She doesn’t know I’ve watched her videos. She doesn’t know I’ve read her Twitter and Tumblr feeds. She doesn’t even know I have a smartphone.

This could be advantageous.

 

 


	7. 26 August 2014

**26 AUGUST 2014**

_Mutter Gottes._ I just realized where I know the curly-haired ginger from.

I’d forgotten all about the “special assignment” Mother gave to me a couple of years ago. It seems like longer than that.

Or shorter?

One thing about immortality is that you have a very strange relationship with time. It gets much harder to tell the difference between what happened last week and what happened last century. But really, there’s only the past and the future. The present doesn’t exist — it’s simply the moment the future decays into the past. A transmutation that happens at the speed of light. I think this is why I love death metal and punk. Humans’ dark and desperate attempts to actually have a present. To have a moment where they are not what they were, or what they will be, but what they are. _La douleur exquise_ of the human condition. A noble, painful quest, ultimately and forever fruitless.

And with that in mind, it’s interesting how much Anne Shirley has... evolved. Sometimes it feels like a relief to be around a person who, even if they don’t realize it, is convinced that their days of tangling with the supernatural are over for good. Mania over normalcy is considerably more tolerable than cheerful, spritely attempts to bring about the apocalypse.

I never told Mother what I saw that day. What the Fairy Queen said to us. To me.

It was probably the three months’ worth of PMS, but I spent the week that followed being angrier than I’d been in literally decades. Angry that there might actually be a being out there that could rival Maman. Angry with Maman herself, who claims I’m her favorite and then keeps so many secrets from me — I brought her the bloodwood statue of Tithia and she snatched it out of my hands without saying a word.

And angry that, after all this time, there was the possibility, however remote, that I still wanted something I can’t ever have. That glowy, cryptic _Ungeheuer_ didn’t say “great love” or “soulmate”. She didn’t say “adversary” or “trial”. She didn’t even say “frienemy”. She said _match_ — and that ambiguity scared the undead crap out of me.

So much for compliments about complements — two years gone and thankfully everything is still the same. In any case, if this _match_ ever showed up I’d probably see her coming a mile away.

 

 


	8. 27 August 2014

**27 AUGUST 2014**

Another perk of death metal: the cupcake’s little scowl every time she hears it.

On the minus side, that beefcake Zeta I bit is following her around like a puppy, and _she’s_ following _Xena_ around like a puppy. Nerd love is gross. I know this firsthand now — for HOURS she and the big ginger galoot were in our room flip-charting over the “mystery”, with cloying sexual tension bubbling just under the surface all the while. Makes my skin crawl.

Under normal circumstances I’d tell them to take their Nancy Drew campaign and hit the road, but lamentably I need to keep tabs on how much they know. And so far that isn’t much, which means I still have a chance at running our little heroine off before Mother can get her. But it also means I continue to suffer the indignity of chaperoning the two ersatz shooflies, along with all the other urchins that inevitably come traipsing over the threshold.

It was a little difficult to keep a straight face watching the buttercup react to Natalie and Sarah Jane, now that they’re both… post-William. And William could barely contain his own sadistic glee. He kept making eye contact with me as if I was going to shower plaudits on him the way Mother does. _Unwahrscheinlich_.

As (what I assume was) a coping mechanism, the cupcake managed to ingest even more sugar than usual. Even after everyone left she darted around like an over-caffeinated hummingbird, wringing her hands and trying to figure out what to do with herself. I, by contrast, felt more relaxed than I have in a week — there’s finally a light at the end of this tunnel. She’s either going to wear herself out trying in vain to figure out what’s happening, or she’ll get freaked out enough to leave. Probably the former.

But the way she kept chirping on about Natalie and Sarah Jane was making me bonkers, so I suggested she watch a movie or something. I thought she would choose from amongst her vast geek oeuvre, but instead she pulled out a Tarantino. Huh. I watched about half of it with her just to make sure she calmed the hell down.

After all this is over and the cupcake is safe and Mother is satiated, I’m taking myself to Cologne for a chocolate spree (among other things) to celebrate a job crappily done.

 

 


	9. 28 August 2014

**28 AUGUST 2014**

It must be nice to live in a black-and-white world. To be too single-minded to notice that evil sometimes has a pretty face and that angels can appear to be the stuff of nightmares.

Not one to do anything by halves, the cupcake started binge-watching a show about vampire slayers. It’s completely inaccurate! Where do they come up with this stuff? But still, I don’t want her getting ideas. I did manage to amuse myself with a rather witty running commentary, seeing how many times I could get her to shush me in a single episode. The record was 17. She provided a fair bit of commentary of her own — mostly yelling sugar-fueled advice at the characters on the screen.

But as the show went on, I started to feel ill at ease. Something about how the blonde in the show was convinced that all vampires are monsters — full stop. Six or seven episodes in, she falls in love with this guy; and when she learns that _he’s_ a vampire, she turns on him without a second thought. Like none of his previous actions or words or intentions amounted to anything. I couldn’t deal with that. The sun was finally down and I needed some fresh air anyway.

Before I knew it, my feet had carried me to Maman’s apartment. Something must’ve been written all over my face, because she put her pen down long enough to pull me into an embrace that might’ve been warm if either of us had hearts that beat. I asked her what she was working on and she said the Library’s had a pest problem for the last century and a half. I don’t recall ever seeing any bugs or mice there, but who am I to question. She had some hot Schokinag sent up and we sipped it in peaceable silence.

That is, until Mother started needling me about why I wasn’t delivering girls. I’d been so _compliant_ in decades past... Better at it, in fact, than _any of her other children_... She reminded me that the past three hundred years were her _gift_ to me. Like I asked for it. Like I owed her. Before I could stop myself, I told her she wouldn’t get her girls until I was good and ready.

 

 


	10. 29 August 2014

**29 AUGUST 2014**

Just got myself a ticket to a Nicholas Boyle lecture next week. Gonna take the train from Graz to Frankfurt. Drink some apple wine. Sample the local… fare.

It’ll be good to get out of Styria for a few days.

What Mother doesn’t know won’t kill her.

 

 


	11. 01 September 2014

**01 SEPTEMBER 2014**

Spilled some Bad Wolf on my pillow yesterday, so I co-opted the cupcake’s pillow. Slept better than I have in a while.

Let’s see how long before she goes nuclear.

 

 


	12. 02 September 2014

**02 SEPTEMBER 2014**

Well, today really couldn’t have been any worse.

The only upside was that the cupcake hasn’t yet noticed that her pillow’s been expropriated. Then again, she was typing frantically at her computer when I went to bed, and was still doing the same when I woke up. That manic glint in her eye can’t possibly be about schoolwork. Now she’s skipping classes and staying up all night. Clearly, giving up the gumshoe act is not something she’s going to do, no matter how exhausted she is. It’s as if she’s _trying_ to make everything more difficult.

Just to be clear: I was on autopilot when I made the cocoa. I stared at it for moment before I remembered I was still mad at Mother, so I handed it to the cupcake in hopes that it would help her look less like a walking corpse. That is what happened there.

But no matter — I had a train to catch!

...and I would’ve made it if I hadn’t paused in the hallway to look at my phone. Two missed calls from a familiar number. No voicemail. My brain barely had time to register an _ach nein_ before I looked up and there she was — Mother. Suddenly it felt like the temperature in the hallway dropped twenty degrees and I knew I was in trouble. She was _displeased_.

Most people assume that the dean is much too refined to air dirty laundry in public, but au contraire. Lilita Morgan is not above that. She may not raise her voice but every word is an icy knife, and because she’s the dean, everyone’s always listening behind their doors. _Stop neglecting your responsibilities_ and _The hour is getting late_ and _If you don’t take care of this situation, I will_.

So long, Frankfurt. No Goethe for me.

The cherry on top was hearing, plain as day (for those with vampire hearing), Laura tell her two ginger cronies that I deserved it. That should’ve royally pissed me off, but for some reason it just felt like my heart sinking into my guts. If Mother can’t understand why I’m not handing this guileless girl over, then maybe I don’t either. I have an obligation, after all, a fealty to Mother.

But ugh! I _hate_ this vampiric serfdom crap! And I hate that I even care. My life would be so much easier if I could blithely give Mother what she wants, but it just feels like I’m betraying Ell all over again. And now the clock is ticking and I don’t know what to do and _I. Am. Stressed. Out._

And then the cupcake looks at me with those enormous brown eyes. _Teufel nochmal_. Maybe she was genuinely sorry for all the schadenfreude. Or maybe she was just sorry that she got caught. Still, for a moment all the noise in my head went quiet…

...until Xena barged in like a big ginger moose.

She apparently discovered that the Alchemy Club’s been photo-tracking all the parties. If I wanted to leave when she walked through the door, I _really_ wanted to leave when I heard _that._ I was pretty sure I knew what she and the cupcake were going to find, and hell if I was gonna be around when they did.

 

 


	13. 03 September 2014

**03 SEPTEMBER 2014**

I don’t really know what to make of the cupcake. One day she’s telling Xena to stop antagonizing me, and the next she’s having the ginger squad tail me all over campus.

And since she’s too damn stubborn to give up her foolhardy investigation, I’ll need to go to Plan B: freaking her out. I wonder what she’d make of a roommate who has a few… special abilities.

But I can’t go back to the dorm yet. A little time to mentally regroup will make all the difference. And it’s still warm enough to sleep outside, so hopefully no one will notice the panther taking a nap in the old graveyard’s yew tree. Or that the panther is listening to the Cure.

 

 


	14. 08 September 2014

**08 SEPTEMBER 2014**

I arrived back at the dorm room a few days ago to find that the cupcake hasn’t been sleeping well. She’s still spending an unhealthy amount of time playing Lois Lane. But hopefully it also means that Plan B is working — since I’ve been demonstrating a few of my little talents for the camera, she seems to be getting twitchier and twitchier.

Not to be forgotten, Mother told me this afternoon to stop wasting time amusing myself. Like a cat toying with a mouse, before… whatever. Is that what she thinks is happening? It’s really not my style, but I can certainly let her think it is.

There’s another pattern developing. By day the cupcake’s antics are entertaining enough, but by nightfall I’ve got that same uneasiness I had with that vampire slayer show. Not sure where it’s coming from this time. By the time I step out I’m quite melancholy; but the night can be so beautiful. So healing. Almost like the darkness outside is keeping away the darkness within.

For whatever reason, the Fairy Queen’s been on my mind a lot lately. I wish there was a way to find out what it was Tithia did to make Mother a “jealous rival”. Jealous is not a word I’ve ever associated with Mother — she’s always been able to take whatever, whenever, from whoever she wanted. Including me. Oh Ell, _mon chéri perdu._

And now Mother wants Laura. As determined as I am that for once Mother can be denied, Laura is no Ell. Laura’s far more trouble than she’s worth. The center of her own tilted universe. And my god, she does NOT stop talking, even when she should. An annoying shrill of a girl that...

Oh no. _OH NO._

 

 


	15. 11 September 2014

**11 SEPTEMBER 2014**

Found out why the cupcake hasn’t been sleeping. _Das Alpträume_.

Not good. Now I know what Mother meant when she said that if I didn’t take care of the situation, she would. One of her minions is getting at the cupcake, and the only thing I know for sure is that it isn’t me. Worse still, the cupcake is now convinced that I, her own roommate, am involved in the girls’ disappearances — and it’s _still_ not enough to get her to leave. In fact, she’s more invested than ever in getting the truth. Plan B’s certainly gone down the tubes.

The only option left is to get her to trust me. Which would’ve been a lot easier if I hadn’t spent the past month trying to get her to _hate_ me.

But first, I needed to buy a little time. For once luck was on my side, because Mother wasn’t home. It took a minute, but after some rooting around in her apartment I found what I was looking for.

The batwing charm had belonged to Georg Andreas Helwing — the inspiration for van Helsing — and Mother acquired it only a few decades after I was turned. It was definitely the real deal, I figured, or Mother wouldn’t have bothered. And sure enough, the moment I touched it I got the weirdest sensation — not quite like a sunburn, not quite like electrocution, not quite like seasickness. A low-grade mix of all of those. It didn’t hurt per se, but it was certainly uncomfortable.

Not wanting to carry that thing around any longer than I had to, I brought it straight back to Crowley, where the cupcake was setting new records for twitchiness. (Seriously, would it kill her to eat a vegetable every once in a while?) I was a little nervous that she’d have a conniption and wouldn’t take the charm at all, but she was surprisingly conciliatory.

So of course she decided to push her luck by asking me where I go every night. None of your beeswax, cupcake.

 

 


	16. 12 September 2014

**12 SEPTEMBER 2014**

She thrashes and screams all night. I know this because, instead of stepping out, I’m staying in to keep a closer eye on her and it’s all I can do not to smother her with her own pillow. Predictably, she’s now also dreaming about a giant black cat under her bed (or so I overheard her telling some of the gingers).

At the risk of sounding cupcake-ish, I wish, sometimes, that we lived in world where I could just sit her down and calmly explain that a pack of rabid vampires has her in their sights, and that she should probably pack her things and make other arrangements for her lodging and education. It would all be very rational. But that’s very much _not_ the world we live in; the one and only time one of my targets had too much information, things went off the rails in a catastrophic and ruinous way. Never again. I’d sooner leap headfirst into the Abyss.

I’ve been sleeping rather fitfully myself. I filched the cupcake’s pillow while she was in class, but it didn’t help this time. It’s probably stress.

And why shouldn’t it be? Mother is intimidating enough, and her vampire minions are _not_ going to stop. They’re just going to keep coming and coming, biting and clawing, like soulless drones. If I’m smart I’ll take any advantage I can get.

Speaking of, one thing I haven’t done in a while is catch up on the cupcake’s videos...

 

* * *

 

Well, that certainly explains a lot.

First of all: So that’s why I haven’t been sleeping well. Cupcake put the _verdammt_ batwing under my mattress.

Second of all: She has no idea how close she and the bio major came to being snatched by William. (Sidenote: “skittering” after them in the Library? Is he completely without a sense of finesse? I suppose it’s not entirely his fault — he’s only been doing this eighty years or so. Such a noob.)

Third of all: DUH, CUPCAKE. _Of course_ _I’m a vampire!_ She’s lucky she’s cute because sometimes she uses pure bullheadedness as a substitute for brains. And those gingers are no better, orbiting around her as if she was the sun.

Watching the bio major gave me an idea though. And just like all of the bio major’s ideas, it’s terrible.

But it’s all I’ve got left.

I’m going to seduce the cupcake and then ditch her. Then, like the many study-buddies before her, she’ll move herself and her anguish out of Crowley, and with any luck, off the Silas campus altogether.

But I need to be careful. There’s a damn good reason that vampires don’t often employ their _Verführungaugen_ abilities. Yes, the technique _seems_ like it would be the easiest way to lure victims — but like most things that are too good to be true, this one has an insidious drawback: the effect can be bi-directional, inadvertently working in reverse. In order to entreat the target, the vampire opens herself up to potentially… becoming overly attached.

I’ll try it the old-fashioned way first. No vampire juju. If I don’t have to risk my own sanity, I certainly won’t.

 _Ave-Maria_. To save her life I have to break her heart.

 

 


	17. 13 September 2014

**13 SEPTEMBER 2014**

I have a strict personal policy of not getting involved with anyone I might actually like. That way lies madness — Mother’s seen to that. And talking of Mother, I managed to do enough bootlicking to convince her that I’ve earnestly reapplied myself to my duty and that she’ll have her girls in time. In time for _what,_ I still don’t know.

In the interim, I’ve been spending more time than usual in the graveyard's yew tree, if for nothing else than to catch up on some rest. The batwing under my mattress doesn’t always work its way into my sleep, but if I lie there longer than five or six hours, sleep stops being restorative. Relocating the charm isn’t an option unless I want to give away the fact that I watch the cupcake’s videos, and right now that advantage is just too valuable.

Now that the cupcake is leery of me, plus the fact that our room plays host to an endless parade of gingers, the situation isn’t exactly conducive to being alone with her. But no matter — the extra time in the yew tree is paying off: I can see my window of opportunity opening up, and a plan is forming in my mind...

I’m going to march straight into their little “trap”. I’m going to take the “bait”. Heh!

 

* * *

 

I hate this plan.

 

 


	18. 20 September 2014

**20 SEPTEMBER 2014**

Oh, cupcake. Cupcake, cupcake, cupcake.

She’s spent the past week doing all manner of “research” on vampires. And leaving it all over her computer screen and social media, where she apparently thinks I’ll never find it.

God, it’s such tripe! _Schnickschnack!_ I couldn’t resist sending her an ask on Tumblr (anon, of course) to inform her that she’s filling her head with all manner of ridiculous inaccuracies. She got her knickers in a twist, and then doubled down by stuffing her pillow with garlic. As though that would do anything. So I ate all her cookies and left the crumbs all over her bed.

I must say, these days it’s quite satisfying to be a slob, and with such glorious abandon. Hard to tell which is whirling around faster — the cupcake or her chore wheel. Everything seems normal, which is perfect; since she’s already suspicious of anything resembling graciousness (exempli gratia: the batwing), Operation Seduction needs to ramp up slowly, or it won’t feel natural.

At least, until she decides to spring the trap…

This whole thing is absurd, really — me trying to “seduce” her at the same time she’s trying to “seduce” me, as if we were trapped in some bizarre, low-rent version of _The Thomas Crown Affair._ Whatever. Steve McQueen gets away in the end.

But still, every time I think about it, I get a bit jittery. _I do NOT want to get in too deep_.

 _Um Himmels willen,_ what am I so worried about? I’ve seen her “sexy face” in the videos, and suffice to say, I’ll be fine.

 

 


	19. 22 September 2014

**22 SEPTEMBER 2014**

So Mattie called. She was at her gate at Charles de Gaulle and was apparently pretty bored and mostly sober.

We hadn’t talked since the beginning of the semester, and I was glad to catch her up. We laughed when I told her all about how funny the cupcake is and how hard I’m working to subvert Mother’s convoluted plot… but when I got to the part about the forthcoming “seduction” there was an awkward pause.

She asked if I thought that was really a good idea.

“Sure,” I said. “I got this. Why?”

“You really don’t see it, do you?”

I wish she would answer a question with a _non_ -question once in a while.

 

 


	20. 23 September 2014

**23 SEPTEMBER 2014**

_Nein. Dies ist nicht Vernarrtheit._

Goddammit. I may be in too deep.

 

 


	21. 24 September 2014

**24 SEPTEMBER 2014**

Last night the cupcake was in a state. Her bad dreams are now a jumbled morass of schoolwork pressures, stress from vampire-investigating, her odious eating habits, and, well, me. Not that all these night terrors have made her any less cheeky. But for the moment there don’t seem to be any other vamps in the mix, and I’ll take small victories where I can get them.

Conversely, the cupcake is proving to be remarkably impervious to my moves. I mean, I’ve got the “brooding poet” act _down_ — even without the _Verführungaugen,_ girls can’t resist that crap! A little direct eye contact and they’re positively captivated by the silliest drivel on astronomy and philosophy and literature, even when they barely know what I’m talking about. But the cupcake _would_ know. She’s a reader. Anyone that can quote Kipling and Chaucer and deGrasse Tyson in her sleep is someone I could… tolerate.

I’ll need to crank the seduction up to 11 in order to get her to change her mind about me. Maybe borrow a nice bubbly from Mother’s wine cellar.

And posthaste, because the cupcake _SPRUNG THE TRAP._ Asked me if tomorrow I wanted to go with her to the Zetas’ luau and… stargaze. _Es ist schon eine lange Zeit…_ I got a strange sensation at this point — like a rush of blood to the chest. Right under the solar plexus.

_...anyway,_ I have very little interest in being “captured” in front of half the school, so I’m circumventing that nonsense. I prefer to stargaze in a Zeta-free zone. More pragmatically, Mother’s girls always go missing at parties, so the cupcake needs to be kept well away from those.

There is one important thing working in my favor: the cupcake will almost certainly be wearing that batwing as a big ugly bracelet. In addition to spuriously trying to get on my good side, by now she’ll have put together that it wards off vampires, so she’ll be sure to have it on her person. That will definitely keep... things... from getting carried away. There isn’t much that’s less sexy than feeling like you have radiation poisoning. Win-win.

Nonetheless, that sensation in my chest — when the cupcake was looking at me with those big brown eyes — is disquieting. This whole thing could go sideways. Very, very sideways.

_Black as the Pit, and terrible as a demon…_ I wonder if she remembers what happens next. _Th_ _ere was one half-minute of desperate silence._ And then Bagheera yawns and all hell breaks loose.

 

 


	22. 04 October 2014

**04 OCTOBER 2014**

Nine days. _Neun_ effing _Tage._

I was convinced I was pre-empting the cupcake’s trap. Showed up to our room early with a champagne vinted by Dom Perignon himself. _Nice touch, Karnstein,_ I thought.

But apparently I over-estimated her ability to use common sense, because the cupcake _WAS NOT WEARING THE BATWING._

A little moment of panic. Lucky for me the rest of her get-up was so ridiculous that I should’ve gotten a medal just for being able to keep a straight face. But when she was so very close to me, glancing at my lips, her hair falling softly around her bare shoulders and smelling so lovely, I nearly... lost myself. Had I turned on the _Verführungaugen_ by accident?

That’s when the brat pack burst in and ambushed me. And William, with his slimy smirk! A broken collarbone should sufficiently remind him that an extra two and a half centuries give me quite a bit more _Macht._ I had to feign a modicum of resistance of course, though thankfully he limped off before he could get an eyeful of those toddlers tying me up with that flimsy bit of yarn. And what a sore loser! He immediately went out and tried to snatch a couple of creampuffs just to show me up in front of Mother again. Except he botched that too — one of the creampuffs tumbled out a window and bit the dust.

Just after the cupcake and her ginger brigade decided that starvation was a winning idea, the bio major discovered my smartphone. Cat’s out of the bag on my social media accounts. The cupcake was _astounded._ Could. Not. Believe. It. What did she think? That I’d jumped off the technology train just after Gutenberg invented the printing press?

I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to tell her a thing, out of spite if nothing else. The tension between the two of us had escalated into an all-out battle of wills, and hell if I was backing down.

 

* * *

 

By the third day I noticed that she was quite a bit more subdued. Her threats of torture-by-spatula, heretofore coming at me like the spray from a firehose, had dwindled to a trickle. Something about her manic energy had shifted — evidence, I chose to believe, that my plan was working! With all this time alone together, I’d have her romanced right out of Silas by the end of the week.

And Mother could be fed a perfectly believable alibi.

 

* * *

 

But by the fourth day the lack of food was starting to make me… emotional. The cupcake was in bed, snoring a little with her mouth open, and suddenly it dawned on me that I may have painted myself into a corner. How, again, was this supposed to work? Did I really convince myself that I was going to make it out of this situation with _both_ the cupcake _and_ my relationship with Mother intact? Doubts about this plan. Doubts about everything. Mother, who I despise for what she did to Ell; Maman, who I adore for teaching me to read in an age when girls, even young countesses, were illiterate. It all seemed too much...

I don’t remember falling asleep but the next morning the cupcake said that my eye makeup had run in streaks down my face. Without saying another word she gently patted my cheeks with a warm washcloth. Neither of us made eye contact.

Clearly, if I did make it out of this situation, not even my dignity would be intact.

 

* * *

 

By the seventh day the bio major was distinctly dubious about the cupcake’s overly-ardent claims of ongoing and aggressive interrogation. Because as much as she tries to talk a big game, _quelle surprise,_ the cupcake is the world’s worst liar.

However, the following afternoon the bio major came back with a blood bag that appeared to have been both ill-gotten and poorly refrigerated. It smelled awful. It smelled marvelous. And as leverage, it gave the cupcake a renewed sense of obnoxious self-righteousness. She poured the blood into a mug and kept holding it close to my nose so that its scent was constant. It was maddening — literally. I began slipping in and out of delirium and by this point was no longer physically strong enough to break through the ropes. Everything went hazy.

Then, in an instant, I snapped back to consciousness. The taste of partially-congealed blood was in my mouth and the cupcake was guiltily fawning over me.

Dammit.

I was spent. Humiliated. I’d rolled the dice and lost and let everything get completely out of my control. Nothing I did made the slightest difference. And I was at the end of my tether — Laura had simply made it too damn hard to save her.

You wanna know everything? Fine.

 _Du gewinnst,_ cupcake.

I quit.

 

* * *

 

The puppet show was just the cherry on top.

 

* * *

 

After that things were… different.

I was still tied to the chair, but it was a roller chair. When the cupcake announced that she was going to “rescue” her favorite flannel (which I’d perma-borrowed weeks ago), she started rooting through my armoire and offering unsolicited opinions about its contents. All I could do was roll over there and fuss, which the cupcake found _hilarious._ From then on I was encouraged to scoot around the room at will. Not that there was much I could do without the use of my hands.

The bag of partially-congealed blood, it turns out, had been procured from the campus hospital. It was barely fit to drink, but the cupcake started giving me as much as I wanted. In a day or so, I figured, I’d be able to bust through the ropes.

She also set me up watching _the Vampire Diaries,_ which helped the time pass. That show is a train wreck — so horrible, yet I can’t look away. (Sidenote: this is the highest compliment I’ve ever afforded a vampire show; the others can’t _even_ be damned with faint praise.)

When the ginger squad walked in and saw that my treatment was considerably more humane, it became clear that there was some dissention in the ranks. The cupcake argued to untie me, but the gingers — displaying uncharacteristic astuteness — decided that the dean was much too menacing.

The idea of them going after Mother. Ha!

But whatever. Not my problem anymore.

 

* * *

 

I may harbor a callous indifference toward most of humanity, but that little _Günstling_ William really makes my blood boil. I don’t care if he cut me out of the ropes — he’s lucky that _all_ he got was a fist to the face, because if I ever see him again I’m gonna put my boot right up his _Arsch._

His and the cupcake’s little skirmish in the bathroom was entertaining for a minute. Both of them fighting so hard and neither realizing that the one in complete control of the situation was yours truly — how adorable. But William, as is his wont, went too far. Nobody bites the cupcake but me. (Sidenote: I’m never doing that again. That girl evidently _is_ what she eats. Ugh.)

And like the snivelling toady he is, Willy-boy ran straight to mommy. He got all the way across campus and I nearly had him when he dove into the lake, knowing I wouldn’t follow while wearing only a corset. That lake is inexplicably frigid and black even in the warm summer months, and I was still low on protein. Mother’s apartment, nestled inside the small castle on the opposite shore, was more than a kilometer away by water and nearly four kilometers overland. Not needing oxygen, he wouldn’t surface again until he got there; there was no way to catch the little stooge.

I looked across the lake. That nameless schloss sometimes reminds me of Karnstein — artifact of a noble family long gone, with modest ramparts and an ungenerous passel of windows. And in one of those windows, even from a distance, there was Mother’s silhouette. Watching. I made haste back to Crowley, trepidation — along with the troubling reminder that Karnstein is now a mountaintop ruin — growing with every step.

But the fun didn’t end there. Once back in our room I was treated to Laura having an absolute hissy fit. Shrieking at me as if I _wasn’t_ an immortal supernatural being! With super-strength! And pyrokinesis! And a slew of other abilities that could kill her in an instant!

As if we were _equals!_

Much as I hate to admit that she’s right about _not_ running, one thing’s for sure — the very instant I come up with a way to avoid complete and utter evisceration by Mother, the little _Detektiv_ is on her own. I. Am. Outta here.

And nothing can make me stay. _Nothing._

 

 


	23. 05 October 2014

**05 OCTOBER 2014**

Even though I haven’t actually gone through with it yet, the mere decision to abandon the cupcake to her fate has been remarkably freeing. Even though Maman is always telling me that I’m above such things and therefore should comport myself accordingly, I’ve envisioned several hypothetical parting conversations in which I tell the cupcake in no uncertain terms where she can shove her webcam. It’s made me quite a bit more cheerful.

A long shower and a nap didn’t hurt either; by the time the cupcake got back from class, moaning about failing her test, my civility had been restored. (Sidenote: she could easily get herself a passing grade, but OH NO that would not be honorable, or something.) I figure I might as well be friendly. Acrimony would take energy I’m not willing to share, and her days are numbered anyway.

The only inkling of exasperation I felt was when the cupcake, digging the batwing out from under my mattress, _still_ hadn’t cottoned on to what it’s for. How can someone so bright be so dense? I actually had to spell it out for her.

But this is the end! No more help. Here’s your batwing, best of luck to you, _auf Wiedersehen._

You’d think she’d be more grateful. When I was putting it on her wrist and telling her how I wouldn’t be able to touch her, she actually looked a bit… disappointed. What was more, I again got that peculiar sensation in my chest. It can’t have been a rush of blood — my blood doesn’t rush anywhere, ever. It was more of a thud, like being punched from the inside. Don’t recall the charm having that effect before.

Not a minute later Anne Shirley and the bio major came trundling in — without knocking, I might add — and flipped their ginger lids when they saw I was untied. I spent the next few minutes trying to get it through their thick skulls that _the dean is not someone you mess with_ when Xena burst in, having a spasm of heroic posturing. Making such quick work of her was deeply satisfying.

More gratifying still was having a front-row seat to her and the cupcake “breaking up”. Or whatever. I don’t care. (Sidenote: how ironic, that the cupcake claims to not need protecting, yet here I sit.) The important thing is that that amazon will no longer darkening my doorstep. Good riddance.

The cupcake seemed genuinely down about it, though. And I’d almost gotten the wherewithal to say something comforting, but at that exact moment, the _Silas-ness_ of this place reared its ugly head when it started raining oversized mushrooms.

You heard me. _Mushrooms._

Naturally, the cupcake darted to the exit to see what was happening outside (I swear, her sense of self-preservation is appallingly stunted) and I grabbed her by the back of her shirt mere moments before a nearby shroom blasted a smelly cloud of spores in her direction. I must’ve yanked a little too forcefully — she toppled over backwards and had almost hit the floor when I caught her. There was a moment where she was looking at me as if I’d hung the moon, her eyes like chocolatey-golden saucers. Another of those thuds in my chest. I promptly stood her back on her feet. _Was stimmt mit mir nicht?_

We spent most of the night dodging spore-zombies and cleaning up after the _dämlich_ Alchemy Club. I’m not normally a fan of group activities, but this one paid off when the cupcake caught sight of Xena on the other side of the quad, dispensing with some zombies in a way that, I reluctantly admit, was impressive.

Once she was back in our room the cupcake occupied herself by lying on the floor, stewing in melodramatic pathos and listening to a perverse amount of the vastly-overrated Leonard Cohen. She only turned off his atonal warbling when I threatened to put my fist through her computer monitor if she played _Bird On a Wire_ one more time.

“Here,” I said a few minutes later, handing her a mug of cocoa. “Maybe some of your chocolate swill will keep you from _sighing heavily_ every ten seconds.”

“For ‘swill’, you sure do pilfer a lot of it,” she quipped.

“And my palate is offended every single time,” I said, sitting on the floor next to her. “I prefer the work of the German artisan chocolatiers.”

“Well, la-dee-da. Like who?”

“Schokinag is particularly delectable,” I told her. “But there’s lots of them. Maybe someday I’ll take you to Cologne, or maybe Mannheim, and we’ll have the _real_ stuff.”

She looked at me and smiled and I knew those thuds in my chest had nothing to do with the batwing.

Goddamn Stockholm syndrome.

 

 


	24. 06 October 2014

**06 OCTOBER 2014**

I don’t hate the bio major. Not really. But they have a tendency to push people a little too far sometimes.

Parasites! I get it! But like I told the cupcake a thousand times, _I don’t know anything else._ I don’t know what Mother is doing with those girls. I don’t know why she takes them. I don’t know where she’s gone with Betty and I don’t know what she did to Ell.

Ell... It was all I could do not to think about her being infected with those nightmarish brain worms.

Feeling pent-up, I went to the yew tree and called Mattie. She was back in Paris and I asked if I could join her there. In a kind but matter-of-fact lilt, she asked why I thought I needed a babysitter. (And would I please stop mumbling and start using diction befitting my status.) Besides, she had tickets to  _ Alceste _ at the Palais Garnier and really didn’t feel like dragging a mopey 300-year-old along behind her. I don’t know how she manages it so consistently, but Mattie has this sing-song delivery wherein total rejection leaves you feeling like you just had an encouraging pep talk. Maybe in a few centuries I’ll be able to do that.

By the time I got back to Crowley the cupcake was being deluged by another nightmare. What she described was like a punch to the gut.

I figured out a while back that it was Ell that was appearing in some of the girls’ dreams. Talking to them. Telling them things. I’ve spent decades trying to convince myself that it’s not really her. That maybe it’s some weird vampire-induced side effect the girls have. Otherwise, surely Ell would’ve appeared to me too. Surely she wouldn’t still think that I was  _ un monstre. _

Surely.

And the fact that she appeared to  _ Laura _ was… I don’t know what it was, but it felt awkward. Even the cupcake looked a bit uncomfortable.

But it was the bio major’s reaction that took me by surprise. They’d apparently had a falling out (or a break-up, it’s unclear) with Anne Shirley and were sufficiently galvanized to grab their baseball bat and march out of there so fast and furious that the cupcake’s short legs had a hard time keeping up on the way to the Library.

I kinda like the bio major.

 

 


	25. 10 October 2014

**10 OCTOBER 2014**

SPOKE TOO SOON. I just discovered what the bio major’s been posting on my Twitter and Tumblr feeds while I was tied up. And boy, the cupcake thought watching me read through it all was a _ sidesplitter. _ You’ll get yours, cupcake. You’ll get yours.

And she did, apparently.

Once we got to the sub-basement, the Library thought it would be funny to keep rearranging the shelves so that we were scrambling around like rats in a maze. At some point I got separated from the other two; after a few panicky minutes I heard a roar, some yelling, and finally a fulminating squishy sound. I turned a corner, and there they both were, covered head to toe in greenish-yellow slime. It was thick as glue and just as viscous, all over the floor and shelves, and they could barely move through it. I managed to get the bio major out by grabbing one end of their baseball bat and pulling. The cupcake, however, was much worse off and had to be dredged out. Got slime all over myself in the process. (Sidenote: I’m on shower number seven, and it’s  _ still _ not completely out of my hair.)

Once we were back at Crowley I asked the other two what had attacked them and where all the slime came from. The bio major suddenly excused themself, muttering something about needing to go to the lab, and the cupcake said she didn’t want to talk about it, it was too humiliating.

“What?” I said, nonplussed. “That you got covered in slime?  _ We all _ got covered in slime.”

“But _you_ didn’t also have—” she cut herself off and then stubbornly clammed up for the rest of the night. She even hoarded the big Sumerian book and wouldn’t let me look at it. (Sidenote: Fine. But raise your hand if you can read Sumerian. Just me? Thought so.) This is puzzling. What kind of thing would, or even could, embarrass _the_ _cupcake?_ She’s kind of impenetrable that way.

And speaking of impenetrable, that book is suspiciously slime-free.

 

 


	26. 11 October 2014

**11 OCTOBER 2014**

The cupcake has apparently gotten over whatever it was that was vexing her, because I’d barely gotten out of bed this morning when, eagerly waving the Sumerian tome around, she pounced.

“Good morning Carm! Well, enough chit-chat. It’s time to start resear—” she noticed I was attempting to surreptitiously drink from my soymilk container. “What are you doing?” She didn’t bother to wait for a reply before snatching it out of my hand. “It doesn’t need to be that way anymore,” she clucked, taking out a clean glass and pouring the blood into it. “Here. Now you can be, like, a civilized person.”

For a moment I was stunned. The thought had never occurred before — being a vampire openly, in front of humans. That humans could think it was no big deal. That it might actually be possible for a vampire to feel totally normal. This could be rather…  _ wunderbar. _

A few minutes later she plopped herself down next to me on the bed, and without preamble, opened the cover so that the book was spread across both our laps. “Oooooo!” she bubbled, pointing at the wedge-shaped markings on the frontispiece. “I wonder what it says!”

“That’s the title,” I said, taking a sip of blood.

“How do you know?”

“Because I can read it.”

She gaped at me for an uncomfortably long time. “You. Can. Read. Sumerian?”

I nodded. Being good with languages is one of the many talents that comes with being a vampire, but if I do say so myself, I am particularly adept. Even more so than Mattie, who was impressed against her will that I was able to pick up Berber the first time I visited her in Marrakesh.

“Wow, hashtag-humblebrag!” trilled the cupcake. “Well? What does it say?”

I looked more closely. “The literal translation is ‘Do Not Want’.”

“‘Do Not Want’? That’s a weird title.”

“Yeah,” I said, flipping through the first few pages. “It appears to be a book full of supernatural creatures. And I’m guessing the title is implying that we should be  _ avoiding them _ at all costs.”

And of course that last part sailed in one ear and out the other.

 

 


	27. 13 October 2014

**13 OCTOBER 2014**

When I opened my eyes this morning the cupcake was staring at me with her brow furrowed.  _ Sie haben mich erschreckt! _

“What do you want, cupcake?”

“I have a question for you,” she said, in a tone that suggested that she was very much in journalist-mode. “If you used your super-strength to pull us out of the slime, why didn’t you use it to escape the ropes when we had you tied up?”

Ugh. I’d been hoping this wasn’t going to come up. “Well,” I said. “Because I couldn’t. Your little starvation tactic worked better than you thought.”

“But we gave you that hospital blood!...” she sputtered. “...eventually!”

“Yeah, but that hospital blood was terrible.”

“What was wrong with it?” she asked, looking mildly offended.

“Blood starts to break down as soon as it leaves the body,” I explained. “Even in adequate cold storage (which, any money, Silas does  _ not _ have) it loses its constitution really quickly. Drinking old blood is like having cheez-puffs for dinner — sure, it’s possible to get full after a while, but there’s very little nutritional value and you don’t feel so great afterward.”

“So that’s why vampires always want it... fresh,” she concluded, unconsciously rubbing the spot on her neck where the puncture wounds had almost healed.

“Yep,” I said, standing up and stretching. All this blood talk was making me thirsty.

“What does it taste like?” she asked, sidling up to me at the fridge.

“Oh, come on,” I said, pouring myself a glass. “Haven’t you ever gotten a papercut? Or accidentally bitten your lip?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I’ve never... you know...  _ guzzled _ it.”

“Excuse me, but I do not  _ guzzle _ anything,” I said, cocking an eyebrow in faux-indignation. “Besides, everyone’s blood tastes different.”

She grinned sheepishly and looked down at her feet. “What did mine taste like?”

“Like liquid sweet-tarts,” I deadpanned.

Her head whipped back up; she clearly thought I was putting her on. I raised my eyebrows pointedly; I wasn’t actually kidding — that girl’s blood is  _ saccharine. _ She considered me for a second, narrowing her eyes and crinkling her nose and trying not to smile. I’ll say one thing for the cupcake: at least I’ll never have to wonder what she’s thinking; whatever’s happening in her head is written all over her face. Inscrutable as a puppy dog. And standing close enough to kiss.  _ Chest thud. _

“Okay, I have another question,” she said, apparently unable to contain herself.

“What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?” I said, sliding away from her nonchalantly. “Because if we’re going to play 20 Questions, I’m gonna need some coffee.”

Later, when we were at the Shunned House, the cupcake caught my reflection in a mirror and was positively incredulous about it. “How come you’ve got a reflection?!” she whisper-yelled. “Vampires don’t have reflections  _ in Buffy!! _ ” She honestly seemed scandalized that I was not existing in accordance with the laws of her show’s fictional universe.

In three centuries I’ve never talked to anyone about the day-to-day of being a vampire (besides other vampires), and now it’s as if the cupcake wants me to make up for lost time. But it’s not altogether unpleasant, like being in a waking dream, where disparate worlds and dimensions are dovetailing in new and wild ways, and you’re a bit at sea but it’s also kind of… fun. A delightful cognitive dissonance. At one point, taking the concept to its logical extreme, I vaguely wondered what it would be like if the cupcake ever met my family… Ha! Over my undead body.

One thing that’s becoming increasingly conspicuous (to me, though probably not to her) is that not all of the cupcake’s questions are vampire-related. Sometimes she just wants to know what life was like in different decades, or my thoughts on various historical figures.

As she was getting ready for bed she asked again, “for realz this time, Carm”, where I’d gotten that ludicrously expensive champagne. Without mentioning Mother or her wine cellar, I told her about  how, when I was a kid (an  _ actual _ kid), Dom Perignon and his wares were all the rage amongst the European upper crust.  One time he even came to Karnstein — it was like having Gordon Ramsay show up at your house. And much like Gordon Ramsay, Dom was a cranky bastard.

One thing the cupcake  _ hasn’t _ brought up is the blood coffin, nor the reason I was imprisoned in it. And for that I’m grateful.

 

 


	28. 14 October 2014

**14 OCTOBER 2014**

In between school obligations, the cupcake and I are working through the contents of the Sumerian book. That is, _I’m_ working through it, being the only one of us who can decipher the cuneiform, as she sits next to me, occasionally asking questions, bringing me mugs of blood or hot chocolate, or falling asleep on my shoulder. _Ich mag das._

The batwing always seems to be on the other side of the room.

Meanwhile, the bio major is toiling away at something having to do with a USB key and some catalogue cards they bayoneted at the Library. They’ve been pretty scarce lately. The cupcake thinks we should get involved in their tiff with Anne Shirley, but I vetoed that. The ginger twins need to figure it out for themselves — it’s condescending to butt into these things without being invited.

Apparently bereft of enough to keep her occupied, the cupcake has been getting antsy about not having posted a video in a while. I asked why she wasn’t sharing some footage of us doing research — she films all the other mundane things we do — but at this suggestion she looked completely affronted.

_"Carm!!_ We haven’t had any new breaks in the case! _LOIS LANE_ would _never_ put something out there that wasn’t truly newsworthy!”

Direct quote.

 

 


	29. 15 October 2014

**15 OCTOBER 2014**

Yeah, this book is not particularly helpful. The bio major and their new digital sidekick haven’t been able to offer any new information yet either. The cupcake, who contributes by doing what she calls “the great Sumerian web dive of 2014”, keeps hinting that perhaps there’s something in the text that I’ve missed. I don’t know how much longer I can keep staring at this thing, though it makes for a good blanket.

Apropos of almost nothing, she asked me if Ell is the reason I went to the Library with them. The cupcake seemed almost bashful — like she’d been wondering about it for a while but wasn’t sure how to bring it up. How can someone swing so capriciously from a total lack of common sense to instinctively zeroing in on things like this? And why do I find it so damn endearing?

Chest thuds notwithstanding, these things she says about my being a “hero” and “saving people” should probably stop.  _ Jetzt sofort. _

But yes. Ell.

Ell is the reason.

 

 


	30. 18 October 2014

**18 OCTOBER 2014**

I really need to be less flippant about the cupcake’s inexhaustible curiosity. This morning’s lightning round of Carmilla-related trivia was, “Okay: best invention of the past 300 years. Go!”

I looked down at the object in my hand and without thinking said, “Tampons.”

Moments later I found myself on the set of a PSA. (Sidenote: the cupcake enjoys talking in a game-show-host voice far more than anyone should. She even uses finger-guns.) Sometimes the weird at this school has absolutely nothing to do with the supernatural.

But in the back of my mind, there was something about the PSA that was… niggling. It hit me later — I hadn’t been surrounded by such a sizable pile of fem-care products since the Great Redwing Migration. The incident in the basement of the Robespierre Building.

Maybe if I was braver I’d examine it a little further. The matter of Tithia. The possibility that my _match_ — soulmate, adversary, equal — is right in front of me. _Aber ich bin zu ängstlich._

 

 


	31. 23 October 2014

**23 OCTOBER 2014**

Some “anon” keeps sending me bad vampire puns in the form of Tumblr asks. And guess who’s the prime suspect. There’s a distinct correlation between the cupcake’s snickering and sideways glances at me and the puns’ online appearances only seconds later. She’s also doing the same in person (“So you’re really 334 years old? You don’t look a day over 200!”) before collapsing into a fit of giggles. You’re your own biggest fan, cupcake.

Yesterday she entered MIRCALLA into an anagram generator website and came up with several suggested names that I might consider for the future, including Callmari, Macarill, and her personal favorite, Clamlira. Very helpful, cupcake, thank you. (Sidenote: I’m getting the sense that she’s actually serious — she expects me to start using one of these when 2034 rolls around.)

Going from being so terrified of living with a vampire to being so comfortable with it would’ve taken a normal person more time, but not so the cupcake. Or, as she now refers to herself when I call her phone, “Laura, Countess von Hollis”. _Sehr lustig,_ cupcake.

 

 


	32. 27 October 2014

**27 OCTOBER 2014**

It took a moment to remember the dream.

_ Cela n'a pas été censé se produire…  _

Ell.

_...j'étais amoureux... _

Ell, screaming at the sight of me.  _ Un monstre, _ she wails, over and over, just like she did 140 years ago. Though no sound escapes my throat, I’m shouting that I wish she’d died. As a corpse moldering under the earth, she, and my love for her, would have no more power; but as a ghost, a spectre,  _ une ombre, _ she is a prison, one whose walls I sense but cannot see, forever whispering that our business, hers and mine, is unfinished. She will never let me go. And I am but a shell, food for crows and fodder for the Abyss. And just as it becomes impossible to tell which of us is the ghost and which is the monster, Ell melts into a swirl of shadows, and then it’s Laura standing there, screaming in horror at the sight of me. And the shadows are swallowing her.

I woke with a start. My face was wet and I was shaking.

_ Dies soll nicht passieren… _

Laura.

_...ich bin verliebt… _

Laura is no Ell.

_...und Liebe ist die Hölle. _

 

 


	33. 29 October 2014

**29 OCTOBER 2014**

I haven’t heard from Mother in weeks. Since that night at the lake I gathered that she was suspicious of me, but now I have a sinking fear that I may be past the Rubicon. Being needled by her every other day is one thing, but this silence is far scarier. Especially since I don’t exactly have a stellar track record to fall back on. I keep going through the pages of this book as if it’s going to suddenly have a chapter on how to handle angry vampiric matriarchs; irrationally but unsurprisingly, this is compounding my frustration.

“Carm, stop reading the Sumerian out loud!” the cupcake admonished this afternoon. “You’re gonna end up summoning some kind of demon! Or casting a curse that turns us all into ferrets!”

“Well, I  _ am _ cursing,” I retorted. “Just not the kind you’re thinking of.”

She chortled in her little cupcake way, and it was all I could do not to go over and...

New personal policy: no physical contact.

 

 


	34. 30 October 2014

**30 OCTOBER 2014**

The bio major’s been taken. Never expected this — they weren’t having nightmares or displaying any of the other symptoms. The worst part was the card; Mother isn’t even trying to hide her actions anymore. It was sufficiently terrifying to the cupcake, but between the lines I heard a message meant only for me: Mother and I are very much in a cold war and headed for a reckoning. 

Anne Shirley is beside herself. Pushed right past her usual overabundance of anxiety and actually got angry. Angry at me for not doing more to protect the bio major. Angry at the cupcake for stirring up all the weird in the first place. Angry at herself for doing that thing that humans always do — taking loved ones for granted until they’re gone. Poor thing worked herself into such a tizzy that she fell asleep on the cupcake’s bed.

Normally I’d be showering the both of them with I-told-you-so’s, but there was no pleasure to be had, this time, in being right. There’s blame enough for all. I can’t protect every student. I can barely even protect the one.

The cupcake herself was all set to go on a self-imposed whirlwind of a guilt trip, but I shut that down. Exposing what Mother is doing is a far cry from causing it to happen, and frankly, the cupcake’s actions mean about as much to Mother as the scurrying of ants in a faraway anthill. But the cupcake, having been raised on a steady diet of fairy tales and underdog stories, will not believe that there’s a point where you give up. Cut your losses and run. Where self-preservation wins out over saving LaFontaine, or Perry, or Betty, or Natalie.

Or Laura.

_ Ich hasse mich. _

And  _ waltzing? _ Ugh. I did the contredanse so many times that by the 1750s I was ready to kill someone (more so) and I could’ve told the cupcake about  _ that _ unsexy little number, but no. I just  _ had _ to pick the waltz — the first time in all of human history that anyone actually enjoyed ballroom dancing. When she stepped toward me and our fingers interlocked there was, yet again, a thud in my chest. Hard enough to almost be physically painful. It was a welcome wake-up call though, or next I would’ve been offering to  _ share _ my bed instead of giving it up outright. Apparently the new personal policy does not come with a side order of willpower.

Oh,  _ why _ do I keep doing this crap? Mother’s message is unambiguous: I can either choose to acquiesce and deliver the goods, spending a loveless eternity in a gilded cage; or I can openly double-cross her and be… punished. There’s no third option. No other way out. No happy ending. And if I don’t choose, Mother will choose for me. 

From the other side of the closed bathroom door I heard what the cupcake said. Thank god she didn’t notice that my shower was a particularly long one. Thank god she didn’t hear me sobbing.

 

 


	35. 31 October 2014

**31 OCTOBER 2014**

One thing I hadn’t remembered about Anne Shirley was that her coping mechanisms tend to be rather... elaborate. She nearly ran over my head (twice!) with a vacuum cleaner, and even the cupcake was a bit dismayed at the offer of 6am brownies.

That said, the idea of putting the webcam on a delay was a good one. Weeks ago the bio major found a way to post the videos to the etherealnet without sounding the alarm, but with Sweet William still posing as a Zeta bro it seems safe to assume that the videos are compromised. Irritatingly, Anne Shirley stuck around and processed her feelings by re-cleaning everything. It was like having a frightened rabbit in rubber gloves hopping all over the room. On the other hand, being alone with the cupcake is probably a situation I should try to avoid as much as is reasonable.

Just as I was starting to think that the Sumerian tome was about as useful as a Bronze Age paperweight, we spilled some blood on it and there it was:  _ Lophiiformes. _ What we’ve been looking for. (Sidenote: Virgins. Again with the virgins.)

What I read next made my stomach plummet.  _ Lucem Esurientes draws the devoured to it and consumes their minds... _

Ell is alive.

Ell is conscious.

The “Light That Devours” is a punishment not meant to kill, but to torture, to prolong suffering for as long as possible. Whoever said that Hell was worse than Purgatory had clearly never met Mother; this is how her mind works. She kept me in the blood coffin for seventy agonizing years, where I was not allowed to starve or rot, but to instead spend every second fully cognizant of my ostracism, my grief, and the limits of my sanity. It’s a fate much worse than death. And all this time Ell’s been the same kind of prisoner...

It made me jumpy, and I nearly came out of my skin when, at that moment, the bio major suddenly reappeared out of nowhere. The cupcake and I seemed to be on the same wavelength in initially suspecting that it was too good (and weird) to be true, but Anne Shirley wasn’t putting a fine point on it. She was hugging the bio major like she might never let go.

And the bio major recorded their own kidnapping! Mother’s nitwits didn’t think to take away their phone. (Sidenote: I wonder if the cupcake is a little bit jealous that someone else’s investigative journalism cred just shot through the roof.)

Considering the sheer incompetence of the lackeys with which she surrounds herself, Mother certainly seems to trust them more than she ever did me. Even that little weasel William is completely in on whatever she’s doing in that cave. Ugh. I don’t know why I even care. Yes, Mother’s always claiming to have some deep and special affection for me, but it’s clear now that she only sees me as a pawn and nothing more. A cog in a despicable machine. That’s all I ever was to her.

The cupcake, upon learning that the kidnapped girls are still alive, has found a renewed determination to try and get them back. She’s convinced that if by next Friday she can keep the now-parasite-infected bio major from absconding with themself, and if she can keep the vampires from snatching one more student, the dean will somehow be thwarted.

The cupcake hasn’t listened to a single word I’ve said about Mother.

 

 


	36. 01 November 2014

**01 NOVEMBER 2014**

The Sumerian book is quite unequivocal on what can be done about the evil creatures within its pages: nothing! How to fight them: impossible! It practically beats you over the head with: can’t win, don’t even try! But then in the back there’s a chapter on weapons you can use to try and fight them. That’s certainly a mixed message.

When almost in passing I informed the cupcake of this latest absurdity, she seized, like a pomeranian with a chew-toy, upon the idea that there might be a magic doodad out there that can defeat Lophiiformes. She set the librarian to combing the internet and is having me translate aloud every single glyph in the weapons chapter. She even suggested spilling all manner of substances on the book to see if any new information would appear.

For some reason, she also kept trying to surreptitiously sniff me. I am _not_ malodorous — I checked — so I’m not sure what this was all about, but after the third time it was just getting in the way of my reading.

“Cupcake, I do NOT have time for this,” I snapped. “And I’m immortal, so that should tell you something.”

I probably shouldn’t have lost my patience, but tensions are high. Anne Shirley is still wracked with guilt about the bio major and is taking care of them as best she can. The cupcake, having let her coursework pile up again, is woefully behind in preparing for her finals, so she naturally defaulted to ingesting nothing but sugar. Cue the _Flight of the Bumblebee._

I, meanwhile, have reread that passage about the light “consuming the minds of the devoured” ad nauseum — well past the point of committing it to memory.

_Jetzt ist mein Geist auch verbraucht wird auch._

 

 


	37. 02 November 2014

**02 NOVEMBER 2014**

Yesterday’s despondency over Ell persisted through the night and well into this morning. The cupcake was bemoaning the eight term papers she had to write within the next two weeks; even though she was only a few feet away, I was hearing her voice as if I was underwater, or at a great distance. Luckily there was also Siouxsie’s voice, close enough to cut like a knife.

“Hey.” The cupcake startled me with a poke in the arm. “You’re scowling more than usual and you haven’t said a word all day. That’s extremely broody, even for you.”

“It’s really not that unusual, cupcake,” I sighed, looking back down at the Lophiiformes passage, where hours ago my brain had inadvertently abstracted the cuneiform into a nonsensical jumble of wedge shapes on the papyrus. “My quote-unquote ‘brooding’ tends to be a solo activity. Somewhere else.”

“And where is that?”

I paused. I’d hadn’t told anybody and wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t regret doing so. “You know that graveyard outside the Lustig?”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “Leftover from when it was the Dudley Chapel.”

“There’s a big yew tree there,” I said.

“You sit under it?”

“I sit _in_ it.”

“Well, let’s go!” she burst out. And before I could react, she’d taken the book out of my lap and herded me out the door. The whole walk over I was only vaguely listening to her winsome chatter, unsure how to feel about what was happening. I’d never attempted to climb the tree the regular human way, nor was I sure it was possible.

But this was not at all a deterrent as far as the cupcake was concerned. “Carm, give me a boost!” she panted, kicking the air in an attempt to hoist herself onto the only branch low enough for her to reach. “Not all of us have super-strength!”

“Wow!” she exclaimed, once we’d climbed a bit higher and were seated side-by-side on a branch with our legs dangling. “The leaves are so thick it’s like being inside a room made out of foliage! No one would ever find us, unless they stood right at the base of the trunk and looked up!”

She continued on in this vein, and while I didn’t want her to leave per se, the collision of her cheerful energy with my weary doldrums was creating a new and altogether un-delightful cognitive dissonance. Our usual dynamic — me as the lugubrious stormcloud and she as the blinding little ray of sunshine — is antithetical, but innocuously so, even when we squabble. However, there’s a world of difference between disagreeing with someone and being simply unable to make sense of them, as if they’d suddenly started speaking in tongues. It’s not aggravating — it’s alien. And now that I’m writing about it I recall feeling this way once before: a couple of weeks ago, when the cupcake was going on about me saving people and being a hero. What she sowed as a divine compliment I reaped as a damning curse.

“Hey Carm,” she said softly, gazing down at the few headstones that were visible through the tree canopy. “Do you believe in an afterlife? Er — I don’t know what you call it — after-undeath?”

“No,” I replied. “No vampire does.”

“What do you mean, none of you do?” she asked, looking at me with her brow furrowed. “Don’t you get to make your own decisions about what you believe?”

“It’s not really an issue of agency. It’s more like, for lack of a better phrase, common knowledge,” I said, recalling how Mattie had explained it to me sometime early in my second century. “When humans die, they see a tunnel and a light and all that; but when vampires die, there’s nothing. Not even darkness. We call that the Abyss. The Primordial Abyss Without Form.”

“So... it’s like a bottomless pit?” said the cupcake, trying to understand.

“No, a pit would be _something,_ ” I corrected her. “This is _nothing._ We simply cease to be.”

“Wow,” she said somberly. “It must be awful, knowing that. If it were me I wouldn’t want to know. At least with the human way there’s room for hope. Hope of something good. Something more.”

“It is what it is,” I muttered.

I can hear Mattie now, saying, as she’s done countless times, her own axiom about this world being all there is, so we might as well stay undead. We might as well enjoy it. Not that she’s wrong. But life is absurd, arbitrary, a constant reminder of what we’ve lost; is it really so much better to live like that?

Suddenly I felt the cupcake’s warm fingers intertwine with my own cool ones. I looked at her. She gave me a small, condoling smile and slowly pressed her lips to my cheek. The thud in my chest returned, more than once this time and worse than ever. It was hammering me again and again from the inside, when an epiphany arrived with almost as much violence.

My cardiac muscle. _Mein Herz._ It was... alive.

I had no plan for this.

“Cupcake...” I started, unsure of how to finish. I stared at the ground below us, suspended in an emotional cyclone, a disaster of my own making. I wanted to kiss her passionately. I wanted to shove her off the branch and burn the tree down. I wanted to disappear into oblivion. I wanted to weep for everything I had yet to lose in the years and decades and centuries to come. If the choice is between feeling everything and feeling nothing, the latter is the only bearable option. “...those term papers aren’t gonna write themselves.”

I slid my hand out of hers and climbed down, barely registering that she was trotting along beside me back to Crowley. Sharing the yew tree with her was a mistake, as was sharing any part of myself. Foolhardy to the point of insanity. I will not touch her again. I will stop, _I must,_ while the regret is still manageable and before it can metastasize.

Because if I let myself fall in love with Laura, one or both of us is going to end up dead.

 

 


	38. 04 November 2014

**04 NOVEMBER 2014**

The bio major only wants to listen to obnoxious party songs. And this is making Anne Shirley very upset. Not that I blame her. The bio major is going downhill quite a bit faster than the other students did since Mother’s new-moon ritual is right around the corner — something they themself pointed out with chilling prescience. 

So, to save us all from the banality of modern music, I made Anne Shirley a playlist. Apparently she relaxes by listening to hardcore hip-hop. Who knew.

 

 


	39. 05 November 2014

**05 NOVEMBER 2014**

The cupcake spent most of this morning watching YouTube tutorials on how to braid her own hair. She eventually managed it, but not before poking herself in the eye several times. More proof that nothing good has ever come from YouTube.

Later it became apparent why she put in such an effort. She invited Xena over, but instead of the cupcake getting an extension on her lit paper, they broke up all over again. I wonder how many times this is going to happen. It’s fun to watch.

Though I’m loathe to admit it, Xena has a point. No one asked Laura to go on this punctilious crusade. Her rather inflexible sense of right and wrong is one thing, but she honestly seems perplexed that not everyone shares her worldview. She isn’t grasping that people are motivated by different things. Sometimes by conflicting things. That it’s possible, in the course of being so selfless, to be quite selfish. After all, even benevolent dictators are still despots. I ought to know.

I think it was being reminded of Mother that led me to volunteer to fetch a sword that the librarian found on the internet. That, and the fact that the cupcake was looking at me with those enormous brown eyes. Did I mention that the damn sword is deep underwater? Inside a cavern? Sealed into the bedrock? Oh, wonderful. Mircalla von Karnstein, _Dummkopf für jeden, den sie liebt._

And then, in a sorry attempt to regain my cool about the whole situation, I stupidly blurted out how I felt about her. Things were going from bad to worse. My heart was threatening to come right out of my chest. _Scheisse drauf,_ I thought. I’ve already thoroughly embarrassed myself, might as well go for broke. I stood up, went over to the cupcake, and...

That’s when I saw what was around her neck.

The necklace had been commissioned by the Borgias, who used shape-shifting, possession, and other such tactics against their enemies. (Sidenote: In the late 1950s I saw _The Shaggy Dog_ at the cinema and nearly fell out of my seat; for everything pop culture gets wrong, every few decades it hits a very unsettling bullseye.) And from what Mattie told me, it’s easy to see why — the House of Sforza was riddled with vampires, and the Medici drew their power from even worse sources. But that’s Italy for you. One big supernatural soap opera since the days of Caesar.

The vessel was Laura’s, but it moved with such icy grace. A voice like glass instead of Laura’s staccato. Touching me without an ounce of Laura’s warmth. I recognized her right away: _Mother._ A chill went up my spine, and the conversation that followed displaced my initial dread with utter disgust. I’ve spent the past few weeks hoping for some kind of option that allows the cupcake and me to both make it out of Silas unharmed, and I got it. It’s a deal with the devil. Mother might as well have challenged me to a fiddle contest.

Her strategy is clear now. She’s not stupid; she could have caught the cupcake and put a stop to the journalism videos if she really wanted to. But she didn’t. She wanted to assess and neutralize the threat — and the threat isn’t the cupcake. It’s me. Mother was just biding her time until she could gauge which side I was really on.

But in Laura’s body, Mother’s abilities were too limited to be able to kill me. I was working so hard to control myself that I was shaking, but I couldn’t hurt her either, not without damaging the cupcake. It was a brilliant, evil move.

And the most vile part is that Mother knows our deal won’t hold. She sabotaged it right from the start — taking the bio major and the beefcake and crushing the librarian right in front of the webcam. Of course Laura isn’t going to stand down when it’s people she cares about on the line! Of course this is all going to fall apart!

The cupcake’s back to her old self again, but now I’m lying to her. Weaving a tangled web of falsehoods to cover up loathsome, shameful secrets, just like I did with Ell. And just like Ell, once Laura finds out the truth — and she will — she’ll leave me and I’ll have no choice but to fall in line again. To go crawling back to Mother with my tail between my legs, now that I’m _un monstre_ of a wholly different sort.

More disgust, in myself this time, when as soon as the cupcake left the room I deleted the webcam video from her hard drive.

Mircalla von Karnstein, _Verräter zu jedem, den sie liebt._

 

 


	40. 06 November 2014

**06 NOVEMBER 2014**

Can’t find the batwing. I’ve looked everywhere. Could Mother have taken it back somehow?

Maybe the cupcake won’t notice. I don’t want her to start suspecting that anything  _ else _ is wrong. And ugh, I blamed the missing librarian on the bio major, who’s now completely out of their mind and hogtied for their own safety. Lies upon lies.

And the knife twists a little more every time the cupcake asks me when I’m going to go get the sword — as if I have the slightest idea of where it is — and I’m rapidly running out of things to say that will forestall her zeal for saving her friends. The only sliver of hope is to get her to sit tight until Mother’s forced to snatch some other random student. Just until the new moon passes. And after that…

Well, I can’t even guess what’s supposed to happen after that. It’s not as if everything will go back to normal. It’s not as if I’ll be able to stop lying. Mother’s put a wedge between me and Laura, and is driving it deeper with each passing moment. And Laura doesn’t even know.

Oh cupcake,  _ bitte verzeih mir. _

 

 


	41. 07 November 2014

**07 NOVEMBER 2014**

The sit-tight plan is already coming undone. The cupcake thought it was a stroke of brilliance to invite the whole school to participate in her war on the dean, and got so excited that she dashed out of the room, right then and there, to begin collecting acolytes. Trying to stop her would have been like trying to stop a runaway locomotive.

She kissed me on her way out, and I can still feel the warmth of where her lips met my cheek. Self-loathing has reached epic levels.

Now I’m pretending to be out there looking for the sword. And to keep up appearances, I’ll have to stay away from Crowley until night. Or at least until the party crowd on the main quad disperses. Hopefully by the time I get back the cupcake will have fallen asleep.

I couldn’t bring myself to go to the yew tree. Maybe someday it’ll go back to being my fortress of solitude, but for now all I can think about is being there with her. How angry I am that I let things go too far. And also that I didn’t let them go far enough.

I couldn’t go to Mother’s, for obvious reasons.

So I’m writing this in the basement of the Library, where I’m half-hoping that something will drown me in slime. That hasn’t happened yet, but three different maps of the campus have flown out of the stacks to hit me in the face and I’ve tripped over a pickaxe that appeared out of nowhere. Damn Library.

 

* * *

 

_Gott._ I deleted the video but forgot to clear the cache.

Laura knows about everything. That I let Mother crush the librarian. That I sold the beefcake out. And that I tried to cover it all up. She threw me out. What we had was over before it even began.

I’m sitting at the edge of the lake now. It seems darker and colder than ever.

But I feel numb. Can’t even cry.

Ell loved me until she found out I’m a vampire. Laura loved me until she found out I’m a coward. A monster I was and a monster I will always be — a wretched truth I should have accepted 140 years ago.

But unlike then, this time I have a stockpile of digital mementos — photos, conversations, little artifacts of Laura’s heart and mind, shared with the world or just with me — right in my pocket. In this phone. What once was a buoy now seems like an anchor. These memories should all be deleted; I can’t bear to keep them so close. If love is not something monsters get to feel, then perhaps they cannot feel its absence either. Perhaps, if I erase her, all I’ll feel is nothing, for the rest of my days. A blood coffin for the soul instead of the body.

 

* * *

 

Just saw her Twitter feed. _Scheisse Scheisse SCHEISSE._ She’s going out to do something stupid. I have to get back to Crowley RIGHT NOW.

 

* * *

 

Goddammit!

They’ve already gone and I have no idea where. I keep watching the video, but it’s no help. All it captured was their last desperate decisions: Anne Shirley, knowing that for the bio major the only way out is through, and choosing to use them as a homing pigeon; and the cupcake, at the point of tears, choosing her principles over her happiness and telling her father goodbye.

The final thing she said in the video was probably the closest I’ll ever get to hearing someone say they love me. And she couldn’t even say it.

There’s a new sensation under my solar plexus. An awful squeezing. I knew my heart was beating for her. Now it’s breaking for her.

 

* * *

 

They’re somewhere under the Lustig! I’d been watching the video yet again, trying in vain to glean new information from it, when Xena burst into the room saying the cupcake had texted her about the old chapel. (Sidenote: The ONE TIME I didn’t go to the yew tree...)

Then, like a bolt out of the blue, it hit me. _I knew where the sword was._

_OF COURSE_ Mother would want to keep a close watch over it. No wonder that lake is so dark and cold.

Xena’s gone to collect the advance guard and get to the caves. I, meanwhile, headed back to the Library, staying only long enough to grab the pickaxe that I’d tripped over earlier and blow a kiss toward the stacks.

Now I’m back at the lake and about to dive in. This is it.

With no moon out, everything is quiet and still, and the cold air is filling up my lungs in the most delicious way. The stars, always brightest on nights like this, are twinkling with a knowing clarity. For the first time, I’m floating, weightless and happy, like going to bed at the end of a very long day. And maybe the universe is smiling; even for a monster, there is great peace in choosing to die for love rather than to live forever without it.

_When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears… I think of the lips I’ve kissed, and of the wretched child I was, and of the madness of life and of the ambition that sometimes carries me away. I’m all those things at once._ Learning that I’m a vampire changed nothing about how Laura viewed me. She was the only one in three centuries who judged me, with purity and without condition, not for _what_ I am, but for _who_ I am. And I will not be a coward. Not for her. My soulmate. My adversary. My equal. My end.

I expect this is my final entry. Should anyone discover this diary, please take nothing else from it but that I went to the Abyss with a full and beating heart.

 

 


	42. 02 December 2014

**02 DECEMBER 2014**

I’m really glad nobody found this diary. God, it’s just full of _feelings._ Embarrassing.

But hey, I still exist, so things aren’t all bad.

After my last entry I randomly tossed the diary over near some trees, grabbed the pickaxe, and dove into the lake. The water was frigid enough to be a shock to even a vampiric system, and too dark to see much of anything. Underwater vampire speed, I learned, is not really a thing. And having been turned as a scrawny 18-year-old, I don’t exactly have a swimmer’s build. Things were slow going.

After a few minutes of pointless paddling around, I surfaced and waded back to the shore. Why would the Library give me a pickaxe, but nothing to help me swim or see where I was going?

I was dripping wet and shivering and shifted into cat form to shake myself off — at least I could be dry while figuring out what to do next.

Hold on...

Duh, Mircalla, you _Schwachkopf!_

I scooped up the pickaxe with my teeth and immediately dove back into the lake. As a panther I glided through the water with power and ease, and my cat eyes were able to make out a lot more detail about what was down there, which wasn’t much. Sparse plant life. No fish. And like most alpine lakes, its floor promptly sloped down into a chasm and out of sight. The only thing that seemed out of place was an area deeper below, somewhat in the direction of Mother’s schloss, that was even blacker than the rest of the underwater world. That seemed to be the source.

The closer I got, the more the water became like liquid ice, even through a thick layer of fur. My cat eyes adjusted to the near-total darkness just in time to spot a massive wall, a nearly-vertical cliff face, looming out in front of me. Winding along its facade was a rocky shelf just wide enough to get a footing, and above that, a small alcove carved roughly — almost haphazardly — into the bedrock. In the very center was a gilded sword, mounted under a thin, translucent layer of stone. I’m not sure how to describe it, but it was as if it was _glowing_ darkness.

The contrast of such a powerful, opulent weapon with its modest surroundings seemed odd. The alcove was bereft of any kind of adornment or indication of what the sword was or who it belonged to. Nothing about the Hasturmenschen or anything. This object wasn’t placed here to hide it from enemies; it was to hide it from _everyone._ Purposefully buried, and meant to be forgotten about. What was I getting myself into?

I pawed at it a bit, but the stone gave no quarter, so with the pickaxe clamped between my jaws I swung it around with enough force to create a few cracks. The impact, however, made my ears ring and my head hurt. Ugh, this was going to be unpleasant. Luckily it only took a few more swings to break enough of the stone so that several pieces of the sword were exposed. Any more and I would have broken my teeth. For dexterity I shifted back into human form and picked away the rock fragments with my fingers. The sword was so cold to the touch that it almost burned.

What was more, the moment my hand closed around the hilt I felt an intense rush of sorrow, as if all the anguish of the past three centuries was crashing into me like a tidal wave. Losing Ell to an unknowable evil. Karnstein, gone to rack and ruin. Humiliation at the hands of the Vordenbergs. Even the disillusionment over Maman. All at once. It was pure grief, pure bereavement, pure heartbreak, folded right into the steel.

No wonder that sword has such power to consume. When love is gone it leaves a void, and that void can trap you forever if you let it. You’re fully in its clutches the moment you make that choice to never love again. I know the sensation intimately.

It’s paralyzing.

For a few minutes I floated there, unmoving, sinking slowly in the cold water until my body came to rest on the shelf of rock. The faces of everyone I’d ever lost flashing in my mind’s eye.

_Sie sind alle weg..._

The sword was sliding out of my fingers. I knew I should care, that I should move, but I couldn’t. Nothing mattered.

_...ich werde für immer allein sein..._

I was only vaguely aware of the warm tears escaping my eyes, and of the icy water stinging my bare skin. There was no point anymore.

_...die Liebe ist ein grausamer Meister...._

The sword left my grasp completely and tumbled down the cliff face and into the chasm below.

_...und ich werde in die Sklaverei sterben._

Almost imperceptibly, there was a small thud in my chest. Unbidden, a pair of enormous brown eyes surfaced in my consciousness. Another thud, but stronger. A smile. _Thud._ A waltz. _THUD._ A kiss in a yew tree. _THUD THUD THUD._

I know why I do this. _Warum wähle ich die Liebe wieder und wieder._

Shifting back to cat form, I shot over the edge and torpedoed down to where the sword was still plummeting toward the unseen lake bottom. In one fluid motion I clamped my jaws around the burning-cold hilt and turned upward.

Once back on the shore and in human form again, I went to send the cupcake and Xena a message that I was on my way — please god they were still alive — but my phone had been in my pocket when I plunged into the lake. _Hoppla._ No matter. I had vampire speed back and made haste to the Lustig.

Upon entering the building I could hear the din of the battle. A stone archway, which at first seemed like a large piece of Theater Department detritus, was the entrance to the old church’s crypt, and through it was a tight spiral stone staircase. Halfway down I nearly stumbled over William’s body — it had a stake through its chest. Ha. At least I’ll never have to look at that cocky face ever again.

Almost out of habit, I mirthfully collected his wallet. And hello new phone!

I was about to kick his corpse in the groin when suddenly there was a rumbling and the walls and floor started to shake violently. _Erdbeben!_

After a few seconds everything was still again. An unnerving silence. From around the corner, _something_ was illuminating the way ahead. As it slowly grew brighter it grew more disquieting, and not having any idea what to expect, I shifted back into a panther, the sword hilt in my jaws.

At the bottom of the stone steps I saw the battle scene, its carnage on pause as dozens of students and a score of vampires were no longer focused on each other, but had all turned toward a light — the most brilliant I’d ever seen, rising up from a great pit in the center of the room. It was Lophiiformes. _Lucem Esurientes._ Completely transfixed, everyone was shuffling towards it, closer and closer to the pit.

And there she was, about to plummet right over the edge.

“Laura!” I yelled, though it came out as a panther’s roar, and the sword clattered to the stone floor. Without another thought I bolted towards her, closed my teeth around the back of her shirt, and (remembering not to pull so forcefully this time) dragged her backward and away from the pit.

By the time the cupcake turned to see what had grabbed her, I was back in human form and clasping the sword. But before either of us could say anything, we heard a horrible, deafening screech, and the temperature seemed to drop twenty or thirty degrees. It was Mother.

She flew at me and I was suddenly swarmed by crows, all of which seemed to be made of smoke and shadows, scratching, clawing, pecking, stabbing. I swung the blade right through several of the birds, but the screeching only intensified. My hands, wrapped around the already-cold hilt, were going numb, and the sorrow was threatening to overtake me again. I started to get mental flashes, this time not just of my own lost loved ones, but also of faces that I’d never seen before.

Some of these sorrows didn’t belong to me. They were Mother’s.

I saw my own face.

Suddenly the shadows and crows pulled away from me and coalesced into a woman; Lilita was standing there, tall, statuesque, and utterly intimidating. Her eyes were boring into me and it was now so cold I could see my breath. The evil light was about to completely engulf us.

“Mircalla,” she cawed, reaching for me with one bony hand. _“Nicht zulassen Liebe deines Meister zu sein. Oder du werden in die Sklaverei sterben!”_

 _“Wenn ich die Liebe wählen, bin ich der Meister.”_ I growled through gritted teeth.

She lunged, and I swung the sword hilt up so that it connected with her temple. She tumbled over and slid into the pit.

If she was screaming I couldn’t hear it. By then the light had completely enveloped me and muffled most other sound, as if I was suddenly in a new room, and on the other side I saw the cupcake as if through rippling glass. Lophiiformes, almost blinding, was still hovering, but now floating figures were emerging from it, crying out to the students for help, but the only sound was a chorus of whispers, desperately pleading not to be pulled back into the pit.

It suddenly occurred to me that Mattie might be wrong. Maybe the Abyss is an actual place. Maybe I was staring at it right now.

As if in slow motion, one of the figures glided up to me. Even after all this time, it was still the most beautiful face I’d ever laid eyes on. Beholding me with such affection. She got so close that I caught a waft of the flowery scent that belonged only to her. It had been so long...

 _“Tu n'êtes pas le monstre,”_ Ell whispered tenderly. _“Tu n'étais jamais.”_

An awful pain in my chest — my heart was both healing and tearing itself in half.

She reached up to brush away the tears rolling down my face, but her hand had no solid form. There was no way for her to come back. Her only path was... on.

She smiled sadly. She didn’t have to say it. I knew what she was asking for.

By then the light was so strong that it was whiting out nearly everything except the sword. I could feel myself start to slip away. Ell began to disappear.

 _“Carm!”_ I heard her say, as if from a great distance.

Wait... Ell never knew me by that name...

_Laura._

Mustering the little strength I had left, I turned to get a last glimpse of the cupcake. I think I said something to her. Can’t recall what exactly, but it was probably a quite elegant and poetic farewell.

The last thing I remember was my grip tightening around the burning-cold sword hilt and taking a few steps’ running start with the blade out in front of me.

 

* * *

 

Then, in an instant, I snapped back to consciousness. The taste of partially-congealed blood was in my mouth, and though my surroundings looked familiar, it took a moment to realize where I was. Crowley Hall, 307.

Without warning something soft and warm tackled me and I looked up to see a pair of enormous brown eyes. The cupcake was chattering at 110 miles an hour but I wasn’t taking in much of it. I still wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t a dream.

But what did that matter.

I stood up and pulled her toward me.

The moment our lips met there was a beautiful realness, a lucidity, a universe that belonged only to us. My pounding heart finally relaxed, settling into a gentle tempo that felt for all the world like coming home after being away for entirely too long.

She kissed me again and again. And sometimes tried to keep talking at the same time. _Halte den Mund,_ cupcake.

 

* * *

 

Not a few minutes later, from the other side of the closed hallway door, we heard an impatient knocking and the bio major’s voice: “Are you done smooching yet?”

Followed by Anne Shirley’s: “Can we come in now?”

I shook my head and mouthed, “No!” at the cupcake, but she just grinned and pulled herself out of my embrace to open the door. Suddenly I was at the bottom of a dogpile. If two months ago someone told me that the ginger twins would have been this happy to see me, I never would’ve believed it. Admittedly, it was good to see them too.

“How on earth did you survive?” Anne Shirley gasped.

“Yeah, tell us _everything,_ ” said the bio major. “What did that sword—”

“Not yet!” interrupted the cupcake, gesticulating towards her webcam. “We have to get this story _on the record!_ I have about _a million_ interview questions.”

I opened my mouth to ask if I got a say in any of this, but suddenly, there was a deep rumble, and, just like the Lustig had done, the entire building tremored.

“Aftershocks,” the bio major told me, their brow furrowed. “Which is weird, because we’re not in a seismic zone. Jeep and I’ve been doing tons of research on it. We’re pretty close to a break-through, I think.”

Anne Shirley handed me a big glass of blood, which was quite old and terrible but still much appreciated. We chatted for a bit longer, and they caught me up on everything that had happened after I went out of commission. The ginger twins took their leave when I said that I’d done a lifetime’s worth of shivering in the past month and what I wanted more than anything was a very long and very warm shower.

But the cupcake started making some very nice-sounding promises about the ways in which I would be rewarded if I agreed to do the interview first.

She’d only just switched on the webcam when the bio major came crashing back through the door, having had a truly unsettling brainwave.

Yeah. We didn’t kill Lophiiformes. Not even close.

It was a mark of how much we’d all been through when no one argued with the cupcake’s suggestion that we abandon the campus immediately and forever. (Sidenote: One of us *ahem* has been recommending the very same thing for months, but that’s apparently by the by.) Fortuitously, our route out led us by the lake, which was now shimmering clear and blue, and I managed to find this diary and shove it into my duffel without the other three noticing.

So now I’m sitting, writing this, next to a campfire in the Styrian wilderness. It’s a cool, crisp night with a crescent moon and the cupcake is asleep next to me, snoring a little with her mouth open.

_Es war ein guter Tag._

 

 


End file.
